another and a better picture, drawing to it
cognate associations, those of that element of the New York cousinship
which had originally operated to place there in a shining and even, as
it were, an economic light a "preference for Paris"--which preference,
during the period of the Rue d'Angouleme and the Rue Montaigne, we
wistfully saw at play, the very lightest and freest, on the part of the
inimitable Masons. Their earlier days of Tours and Trouville were over;
a period of relative rigour at the Florence of the still encircling
walls, the still so existent abuses and felicities, was also, I seem to
gather, a thing of the past; great accessions, consciously awaited
during the previous leaner time, had beautifully befallen them, and my
own whole consciousness of the general air--so insistently I
discriminate for that alone--was coloured by a familiar view of their
enjoyment of these on a tremendously draped and festooned _premier_ of
the Rue-St.-Honore, bristling with ormolu and Pradier statuettes and
looking almost straight across to the British Embassy; rather a low
premier, after the manner of an entresol, as I remember it, and where
the closed windows, which but scantly distinguished between our own
sounds and those of the sociable, and yet the terrible, street of
records and memories, seemed to maintain an air and a light thick with a
mixture of every sort of queer old Parisian amenity and reference: as if
to look or to listen or to touch were somehow at the same time to probe,
to recover and communicate, to behold, to taste and even to smell--to
one's greater assault by suggestion, no doubt, but also to the effect of
some sweet and strange repletion, as from the continued consumption,
say, out of flounced and puckered boxes, of serried rows of chocolate
and other bonbons. I must have felt the whole thing as something for
one's developed senses to live up to and make light of, and have been
rather ashamed of my own for just a little sickishly staggering under
it. This goes, however, with the fondest recall of our cousins' inbred
ease, from far back, in all such assumable relations; and of how, four
of the simplest, sweetest, best-natured girls as they were (with the
eldest, a charming beauty, to settle on the general ground, after
marriage and widowhood, and still to be blooming there), they were
possessed of the scene and its great reaches and resources and
possibilities in a degree that reduced us to small provinci